Many drive schemes for causing ink discharge have been proposed for inkjet devices, including a pump scheme, a piezoelectric scheme, a thermal scheme, and so on. For example, in the piezoelectric scheme, a drive signal (i.e., a drive voltage signal) is applied to voltage elements in order to cause ink discharge by causing an ink reservoir to expand and contract, which applies pressure to the ink within the ink reservoir and causes ink drops to be discharged from nozzles.
In recent years, application technology used in inkjet device is expected to be adapted to device manufacturing, such as for organic electroluminescence devices. Improvements to the landing accuracy of ink drops are thus demanded for increasing device precision.
An impediment to landing accuracy improvements is the problem of satellite mist. This is due to the fact that when ink drops are discharged and fly forward, the rear of the ink drops extends into a ligament, which becomes overextended and is dispersed into micro-droplets that land in locations other than a set landing position.
Increasing the magnitude of the pressure applied to cause the discharge of ink drops tends to extend the length of the ligaments for the ink drops. Ink drops with longer ligaments are more prone to producing satellite mist upon to dispersion of the overextended ligament. Thus, a method for constraining the magnitude drive voltage signal used to cause the discharge of ink drops as much as possible has been considered (Patent Literature 1).